Top 10 collector cars of the future — really?

The Los Angeles Times did a list recently of the top 10 collector cars of the future. In other words, buy them now, hang on to them and then sell them at the Monterey auctions 30 years from now. (After all, the Monterey auctions sold more than $300 million worth of cars at the big Monterey auto fest last month.)

In no particular order, here are some of them: SRT Viper (I always thought it was an unfinished car; the design got stuck halfway through); Porsche Cayman S (will it have the collector cachet of the 356 series?); Tesla Model S (could be, if Tesla goes in the tank); and the Audi RS5 (there are so many performance permutations of Audi that you wonder why they would single out this one.)

I once had a third-generation Mazda RX7 and a lot of people thought that might be a collector car of the future because, among other things, Mazda brought so few of them to the U.S. The car, however, developed a reputation for being too finicky (turbos self-destructing, among other things) and these days you can find them for not too much money. Not that being finicky should be a criterion for collector status. Look at Ferrari, or Lotus. Who knows? Maybe the 1993-94 Mazda RX7 will take off 10 years from now.